The Bridge Over Troubled Water The year was 1970. The world had just lived through a difficult transitional decade of the 60’s. Students at Kent State had died on the campus. A cow pasture in Bethel, New York had been trampled by more than 400,000 young people seeking love and harmony and the best rock and folk music of the day. Both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Ted Kennedy was busy…
Goal! In working out my new games area it became clear that Handy Brad would need help. Mostly he needed help with the heavy lifting involved in moving artificial turf around. The 15×60 main piece, prior to installation weighed about 350 pounds, which is 300 more than I prefer to lift. There is also the old turf that has about 750 pounds of sand on it, so that weighed perhaps 1200 pounds and was in…
Tree People It is the morning of Labor Day 2020 and I am sitting in my office in my underwear (one of the luxuries of life on the hilltop where I am out of view of all prying eyes). I have just spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to fix a documentation gremlin that has plagued me. I have to send a signed grant award contract to an agency in Scotland. The first version I…
Democracy as We Knew It When I was born in 1954, the United States with its $390B in GDP, represented 7.23% of global GDP. In 1954 we were the beacon of democratic light. We had just saved the free world from the horrors of Fascism that had spread from Germany to Italy and Spain and was blooming in its own Asian version in Japan. We can’t even talk about Latin America in those days since…
Going Bald This is purported to be the hottest day of the year out here in San Diego. My weather.com app (now owned and operated by the once-venerable IBM) tells me it is already 87 and the sun has just come up. The high is supposed to get to 109. Yesterday was the first time since their installation in April, that my Tesla Wall Batteries got a workout. The electricity grid from San Diego Gas…
Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot It’s been a hot month here on the hilltop. My pattern has been to spend the early morning catching up on news and perhaps writing my daily story, then go work outside doing something on some project or other for the late morning hours, working up a sweat. Then, after a dip in the spa or cooling shower, I go into the coolness of the house to do my serious work.…
A Pain in the Neck Quick, without thinking too much, which do you get more often, a pain in the ass or a pain in the neck? I’m betting on the later. I will admit to having had a hemorrhoid or two in my sixty-six years and I may have pulled a glut muscle once or twice, but pains in the ass are pretty rare by my estimation. But pains in the neck are way…
The Longest Days Last night I stumbled on a Netflix series about the people around Adolf Hitler and how the National Socialist German Workers’ Party grew to prominence and control in Germany. The bottom line is that it was a slow and steady process that took fifteen years to take serious root and then lasted for twelve years. It started in 1918 as a direct result of the ignominious defeat of Germany in WWI and…
My Garden Desk When building out my garden recently, I had a heavy 3/8”-gauge steel pipe 8” in diameter, welded to a two-foot steel plate, left over from a shadesail pole that was installed. When I saw it, I saw a table base for some reason and the very small part of me that is penny-wise said that I should repurpose such a wonderful piece of steel. Steel was only introduced into human existence a…
Sunday School I was baptized Catholic because my mother was raised Catholic and because we were living in Venezuela at the time (my father was Venezuelan and my mother worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela). But after my parents were divorced (yes, they were both Catholic and yes, they were both technically excommunicated for that) and the next thing you know we were in Costa Rica without my father. The thing about Costa Rica…